Politics | Arts & Culture | Nasty Women New Haven | Visual Arts | COVID-19
McClure in late February of this year, installing the fourth annual Nasty Women group exhibition. The Thank God For Abortion campaign was first launched in 2015 by the multimedia artist Viva Ruiz. Mateo Gutiérrez' mixed media And I Feel Fine is pictured in the background.
First it was a single exhibition. Then it was two, with additional pop-up workshops and educational programming. Then there were third and fourth iterations, with discussions that continued during a global pandemic. In the lead up to the 2020 election, Nasty Women Connecticut co-founder Luciana McClure is looking back at the politics that that launched the group four years ago—and the work the group still has cut out for itself after Tuesday.
Nasty Women is the collective of artists and activists named after Trump’s insult to Hillary Clinton in October 2016, at the final debate before the 2016 presidential election. McClure co-founded the group with curator Sarah Fritchey and artist Valerie Garlick in early 2017, after the election of Donald Trump.
Since its beginnings in a space owned by the Institute Library, the show has jumped from downtown New Haven to the Ely Center of Contemporary Art and Yale Divinity School to the edge of East Rock at the Urban Collective. During COVID-19, it has launched virtual tours and a series of activist talks on museology, public art, and curatorial work during the parallel pandemics of COVID-19 and white supremacy.
Along the way, McClure had her own crash course in intersectional feminism, including the realization that Black and Latinx women and LGBTQ+ voices in the arts are still frequently passed over for cisgender, straight white women. On the eve of the 2020 election, she praised the accomplices she’s had along the way, from Fritchey to the New Haven Pride Center to co-conspirators Attallah Sheppard and Louisa de Cossey.
“We’re not waiting for these tables to exist,” she said in a recent interview. “We’re building these tables within our community.”
An edited version of that interview is below.
I want to go back four years and talk about what your hopes were for Nasty Women when it first came together. Let’s start there.
I think my hope when Nasty Women first came together was for us to continue. I wanted us to stay the core team from the very beginning. I wanted that to remain. I wanted that energy to not stop—and I wanted to change the way we thought about feminist art and intersectionality.
You know, the way we thought about how we see patriarchy every day—or how we don’t, because we’re living in the belly of this beast. I wanted Nasty Women to be able to tackle that beast and destroy it to the point that it becomes far into our memories.
Take me back to the night of November 8, 2016. Or maybe the wee hours of the morning the next day.
I was in disbelief. I was scared. I was angry. Confused. But I was ready to do something. It was the first time I felt so ready to do something. That fire, all of a sudden, was there. And I was welcoming it.
Were you thinking about this and looking at this before the election of Donald Trump?
I think I saw it, but I couldn’t name it. Like, I didn’t know how to name it. There was a sense of “Oh, we don’t talk about this.” I couldn’t form the language myself, because I had to undo what had been done to me, and what I had accepted. For me to be able to talk about it—I realized I had to be able to reject all of those things and face it head on.
To this day, there are so many times I see people saying: “Okay, let’s talk about this.” I’ve been talking about this. I’ve been having conversations like this in other circles. This is not new. But particularly because white, cis women haven’t been directly affected by those issues, they think: “Why talk about socioeconomics? Why talk about single parenting? Why talk about immigration? Why talk about issues of femicide? Why talk about what it’s like to carry the entire world on your back?”
There’s no space. There’s this sense that you’re just complaining or it’s your fault. A thing we don’t talk about enough is the way patriarchy is stronger than racism. We will put a man of any kind of heritage, culture—anything—before we put a woman. Certainly before we put a woman of color.
The past two weeks, with the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett and the upcoming election, have I think felt really heavy to a lot of people. I couldn’t help thinking about the fact that often, a measure comes out on women’s health—maybe it’s abortion, maybe it’s mammography—and you’ll look at the photo and it will be a panel of almost entirely white men.
Because women’s bodies are not ours! We’re still just trying to fight for the basic ownership of our own bodies and basic autonomy, whether it is preventive healthcare, whether it is because I want to be a mother. The people making those decisions don’t even understand women’s bodies or women’s health. Or the intersection of all those issues.
Luciana McClure (top) and curator La Tanya Autry (bottom) on Instagram in April of this year, during "Activist Talks In COVID-19." Lucy Gellman Photo.
Since that first groundswell—the protests, the Women’s March—some people have come forward saying they don’t like the term “Nasty Woman.” Why did you choose to keep it?
I think it goes back to reclaiming a word that has been used to degrade women. We can see historically how that has happened—women were called “bitches” and all of a sudden there was Bitch Magazine. It’s like that. We’re gonna take this word, and we’re gonna make it ours. We’re not going to let them have that word.
There was something liberating in asking: How do we understand how an attack on one woman is an attack on all of us? How does it go from something that may be playful and joking to something that is extremely problematic because we give it a pass?
So we decided to continue because of that, and because it connected us to bigger conversations as well—within other organizations, feminist history, and within the movement itself.
In what ways did Nasty Women surprise you, for the better and the worse?
We’ll start with the worse. I think for the worse is realizing how many people are into the performative aspect of activism, and how many people who did not believe in the work that we were ready to do. Even though there was no answer of how we were going to continue.
The way it started was the way we moved forward—figuring it out along the way. Figuring out how to stay relevant. How to learn. How to be challenged and how to change through growth. That was very hard. It was a very hard process. It involved some partnerships that no longer exist, people leaving the group, and me looking into myself and understanding what it was that I wanted and what it was that I was willing to put up with.
And how I also had to change in order for the organization to grow. I just had to be ready to deal with the unexpected. There are times that I felt very much alone.
But that also leads to the good. I was surprised by the community that I discovered through the process. I found people that believed in the work that I was doing, and that validated the work in a way that I didn’t realize I needed. We always say: “I don’t need validation. You shouldn’t seek validation.” But there’s something incredibly moving and powerful when people come to you and they tell you the impact that your work has had on them when you’re not so sure you know what you’re doing and you’re investing everything you have.
It’s all part of growth. I think Nasty Women wouldn’t have continued if it wasn’t for that. If it wasn’t for the conversations I’ve had that taught me so much about the history of feminism and the history of toxic, white feminism.
You know, I think real activism, real radical work, it’s not that popular. There’s something about really believing in the work—to show up and to shift it from conversations into action. We’ve carved a space in the feminist timeline. We are there. New Haven is there, New Haven is a space where people can grow.
How do you feel that it’s evolved in four years?
So much! I think we’ve learned so much. We’ve done collaborations, workshops, exhibitions. We’ve entered very white spaces, like the Aldrich [Contemporary Art Museum], the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, and Dartmouth. We were in places that we never expected to be. We’ve met people after reading books about them. I think in four years, we changed, we grew, we learned about ourselves.
What does it mean to run a collective? What does it mean to write grants and do a budget? I learned all these life skills through Nasty Women, and I discovered an entire community that has forever changed me.
I guess what I mean is how has the mission evolved?
In the beginning, we were an organization that used mainstream feminist rhetoric for activism and community building. Over time, we realized we were so much more than that. There was something really organic and transformative about Nasty Women—partly because we never held a physical space. We are so much about collaboration, and we are so much about creating a platform of advocacy and education. Not being tied so much to a mission that’s carved in stone, but to be able to change and transform.
We aren’t just sitting around and making exhibitions and profiting off of it. Because really, we don't make any money. We are asking: How can we create a space where discourse can exist from our living rooms? From social media? When COVID-19 hit, it was trying to figure out how these collaborations happen virtually.
The biggest change is realizing that so much of Nasty Women must go back to education. How are we being taught, and how are we not being taught?
And for you, what’s the answer to that?
It was me going back to school, to Southern [Connecticut State University] to get a M.A. in women and gender studies. I realized a lot of the work was inside academia. I realized, through conversations in our community … like the story of the slave play in Hamden. That’s a feminist issue. The fact that we are not talking about racism, feminism, sex education—the fact that we’re not given language around all these complex issues—that’s a problem. That’s where the propagation of white feminism is starting.
Think about the executive order on critical race theory. How is it that we are okay erasing an entire history of genocide, racism, misogyny, like it never happened? Everything that we do, everything that we are affected by goes back to certain, very specific spaces. And I think education is a big one.
How is it that we’re allowing people to say, “We just don’t talk about that.” We need to talk about it! Because at some point, it’s just going to all explode in our faces.
That brings me to the current moment [McClure is a Biden-Harris supporter]. How are you feeling about the election?
I worry a little bit. I can’t help but worry. Because either way we have work to do. But it’s very clear where the work is more likely to happen, and where the work will be more challenging. It’s tense, because we’re also in the middle of a global pandemic. So there are a lot of things that are happening. I want to stay hopeful and I want to stay positive, but I also want to be prepared.
I’m particularly worried about my Black and Brown brothers and sisters, about Indigenous folks, about the people who are hurting the most—people at the border.
And what does that look like? On the one hand, you can’t really gather people in an indoor space. On the other, you’re running a group that looks different than it did four years ago.
You know, I was watching a conversation between James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni, a dialogue between them from 1971. They had very different ideas. Very different minds, brilliant minds. But one thing that Nikki Giovanni said was: “If only everybody cared about their own neighborhood, just did work within their own spaces, I feel we could accomplish so much more.”
That’s something that really stuck in my mind. It made me think about New Haven. It made me think about the ways we show up for each other, and sometimes how we don’t. About the way these women have been leading Black Lives Matter New Haven—they are doing everything. I was thinking about how at some of the protests, white and Latino allies were showing up and protecting people with their bodies. Getting pepper sprayed.
For me, this is a way of thinking about community. We can’t control so much that is outside of Connecticut. We can barely control what’s in Connecticut. But we can control so much what’s in our community. What are we working for?
When is it that we are going to understand what allyship is? When is it that we’re going to understand, like, how we want people to show up, so that we can let those that are hurting the most rest and heal? To me, it is about attempting to build a community of care within our own space. Within New Haven. Because in New Haven, we’re already dealing with how divisive it is. There isn’t one New Haven. There are many New Havens. Maybe we can focus on that.
So what’s your plan for Tuesday?
My household and extended household have all voted absentee. So now it’s about encouraging people to vote. Making sure that we continue to keep the conversation going. It’s art, advocacy, education, action. We’ve just gotta keep bringing those things together. Whatever the result is Tuesday, or Wednesday morning, I think either way there is work. It’s gonna be a while until we can rest.